Last month, Apple’s latest earnings call announced its “most successful year ever.” The numbers were reported, the stories were spun and Wall Street basically anointed Apple the god of capitalism.

But where there’s smoke, there are mirrors.

They’re all wrong.

BRYAN CLARK IS THE LAST SANE MAN IN A WORLD GONE MAD. A world based on “math” and “numbers,” like those are even real things.

Apple is the largest company in the world, but success is fleeting.

Numbers are meaningless, success is a unicorn, magic is real, Apple is doomed. Got it. Reads like that last Narnia book where Lewis boringly wrapped everything up by basically killing everyone, but got it.

The magic continues as the possession of a noun undergoes a startling transformation!

ALLA-KAZAM! PRESTO-CHANGE-O! THOSE NUMBERS YOU THOUGHT WERE WALL STREET’S ARE NOW APPLE’S! Feel free to question your belief system. That’s perfectly natural at a time like this when you learn that magic… IS REAL!

This year is different. Apple swung. Apple missed.

It’s not, actually. Apple has missed Wall Street’s numbers from time to time since at least three years ago. It’s a thing you can look up on any of the major Internet search engines. So, anything other than Yahoo.

Apple lives and dies by the iPhone.

Which is a huge problem because apparently no one buys iPhones anymore. Too popular.

Pundits keep saying things like “The Watch is no iPhone” and “The Apple TV is no iPhone.” That’s probably good because if they were they’d just be bemoaning Apple’s dependence on them.

The software that “just worked” is slow and glitchy.

The software is slow, which is why people are literally complaining that Touch ID works too fast and they can’t see their notification screen and, ugh, don’t tell them to press the side button instead of the home button that’s so hard.

No. First of all, that link goes to a software bug that Apple fixed. Second, the Macalope defies you to describe the iPhone 6s or the iPad Pro as “underpowered.” Yes, many of the entry-level Apple products are devices the Macalope wouldn’t necessarily recommend, but compared to its competition, Apple’s hardware is unparalleled.

There are larger issues on the horizon: For example, how does Apple compete with Windows and Android?

Oh, the Macalope knows this one! By creating a better user experience and taking the high, profitable end of the market and leaving the low end to them. Basically, what it’s been doing for years, being wildly profitable by not chasing market share.

Both have proven to be amazingly adept in recent years not only at competing with Apple in form factor, but functionality as well.

So, the company that takes most of the profit is in trouble, the companies that make almost no money in mobile (Microsoft) or depend on Apple for a large part of their mobile revenues (Google) are the winners.

How many newt eyes are in this crazy conjuring? All of the newt eyes? It seems like it might be all of them.

The watch is undeniably cool, but it really fails to do anything better than your phone.

To make matters worse, you have to have an iPhone close by in order to even use most of its features. Similar Android models are self-contained and only require an occasional sync.

Which must be why Android Wear is outselling the Apple Watch, whoops, nope, not even close.

The autonomous car project sounds promising, but competing against Google and Tesla in addition to auto industry giants like Lexus and Mercedes is an uphill battle full of technology challenges, government red tape and changing century-old transportation conventions.

Yes, certainly the largest technology company in the world with a huge cash reserve… uh… can’t do… anything… in the… with the… While Google presumably can because… you see… there’s… and… yeah…

Well.

The Macalope thinks what we’ve learned here today is that any sufficiently advanced collection of unsubstantiated accusations dressed up as a critical assessment is indistinguishable from magic.

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